WASHINGTON - On most days, the Pentagon's "Early
Bird", a daily compilation of news articles on
defense-related issues mostly from the US and British
press, does not shy from reprinting hard-hitting stories
and columns critical of the United States Defense
Department's top leadership.

But few could help
notice last week that the "Bird" omitted an opinion
piece distributed by the Knight-Ridder news agency by a
senior Pentagon Middle East specialist, Air Force Lt Col
Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith until her
retirement in April.

"What I saw was aberrant,
pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline,"
Kwiatkowski wrote. "If one is seeking the answers to why
peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a
presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam [Hussein]
occupation [of Iraq] has been distinguished by confusion
and false steps, one need look no further than the
process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense
[OSD]."

Kwiatkowski went on to charge that the
operations she witnessed during her tenure in Feith's
office, and particularly those of an ad hoc group known
as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), constituted "a
subversion of constitutional limits on executive power
and a co-option through deceit of a large segment of the
Congress".

Kwiatkowski's charges, which tend to
confirm reports and impressions offered to the press by
retired officers from other intelligence agencies and
their still-active but anonymous former colleagues, are
likely to make her a prime witness when Congress
reconvenes in September for hearings on the manipulation
of intelligence to justify war against Iraq.

According to Kwiatkowski, the same operation
that allegedly cooked the intelligence also was
responsible for the administration's failure to
anticipate the problems that now dog the US occupation
in Iraq, or, in her more colorful words, that have
placed 150,000 US troops in "the world's nastiest rat's
nest, without a nation-building plan, without
significant international support and without an exit
plan".

Kwiatkowski's comments echo the worst
fears of some lawmakers, who have begun looking into the
OSP's role in the administration's mistaken assumptions
in Iraq. Some are even comparing it to the off-the-books
operation run from the National Security Council (NSC)
during the Ronald Reagan administration that later
resulted in the Iran-Contra scandal.

"That
office [OSP] was charged with collecting, vetting,
disseminating intelligence completely outside the normal
intelligence apparatus," David Obey, a senior Democrat
in the House of Representatives, said last month. "In
fact, it appears that the information collected by this
office was in some instances not even shared with the
established intelligence agencies and in numerous
instances was passed on to the National Security Council
and the president without having been vetted with anyone
other than [Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld]."

Little is known about OSP, which was originally
created by Rumsfeld and his top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz,
to investigate possible links between Saddam and Osama
bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist group. While only a dozen
people officially worked in the office at its largest,
scores of "consultants" were brought in on contract,
many of them closely identified with the
neo-conservative and pro-Likud views held by the
Pentagon leadership.

Headed by a gung-ho former
navy officer, William Luti, and a scholarly
national-security analyst, Abram Shulsky, OSP was given
complete access to reams of raw intelligence produced by
the US intelligence community and became the preferred
stop, when in town, for defectors handled by the Iraqi
National Congress (INC), led by Ahmed Chalabi.

It also maintained close relations with the
Defense Policy Board (DPB), which was then chaired by
Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), Feith's mentor in the Reagan administration.
Perle and Feith, whose published views on Israeli policy
echo the right-wing Likud party, co-authored a 1996 memo
for then-prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu that argued
that Saddam's ouster in Iraq would enable Israel to
transform the balance of power in the Middle East in its
favor.

The DPB included some of Perle's closest
associates, including former Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) director James Woolsey and the former Republican
speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich,
who played prominent roles in pushing the public case
that Iraq represented an imminent threat to the United
States and that it was closely tied to al-Qaeda and
other terrorist networks.

In her article,
Kwiatkowski wrote that OSP's work was marked by three
major characteristics:

First, career Pentagon
analysts assigned to Rumsfeld's office were generally
excluded from what were "key areas of interest" to
Feith, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, notably Israel, Iraq, and
Saudi Arabia. "In terms of Israel and Iraq, all primary
staff work was conducted by political appointees; in the
case of Israel, a desk officer appointee from the
Washington Institute for Near Policy [a think tank
closely tied to the main pro-Israel lobby in Washington,
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee]."

Second, the same group of appointees tended to
work with like-minded political appointees in other
agencies, especially the State Department, the NSC, and
Vice President Dick Cheney's office, rather than with
those agencies' career analysts or the CIA. "I
personally witnessed several cases of staff officers
being told not to contact their counterparts at State or
the National Security Council because that particular
decision would be processed through a different
channel," Kwiatkowski wrote.

The CIA's exclusion
from this network could help explain why Cheney and his
National Security Advisor, I Lewis Libby, a long-time
associate of Wolfowitz, frequently visited the agency,
in what analysts widely regarded as pressure to conform
to OSP assessments.

Third, this exclusion of
professional and independent opinions, both within the
Pentagon and across government agencies - according to
Kwiatkowski - resulted in "groupthink", a technical term
defined as "reasoning or decision-making by a group,
often characterized by uncritical acceptance of
conformity to prevailing points of view". In this case,
the prevailing points of view were presumably shaped by
neo-conservatives like Feith, Wolfowitz and Perle.

Kwiatkowski's broadside coincides with the
appearance in neo-conservative media outlets, notably
the Wall Street Journal, of defenses of Feith, who is
widely seen as the Pentagon's most likely fall guy if it
is forced to shoulder blame for bad intelligence and
planning. The government of British Prime Minister Tony
Blair has pressed President George W Bush to fire Feith
for several months, according to diplomatic sources.

In a lengthy defense published on Tuesday, the
associate editor of the Journal's editorial page
described Feith's policy workshop as "the world's most
effective think tank".